Lancaster County Fire Commission flags FirstView rollout, NERIS reporting changes and recommended budget gaps

At a Lancaster County Fire Commission meeting, commissioners and staff reviewed ongoing problems integrating fire data into the county’s incident-reporting systems, discussed the upcoming migration from NIFRS to NERIS, and examined a county administrator’s recommended budget that raises many line items but does not fully fund all requests from the commission.

The commission said the issues matter because the county’s reporting platform and its connections to GIS and CAD systems affect data quality, accreditation work and how field crews document responses. Commissioners and chiefs warned that incomplete imports, corrupted hydrant data and weak CAD feeds are limiting the county’s ability to run accurate queries, produce historical reports and meet future reporting requirements when NERIS goes live.

Staff and commissioners outlined the technical problems and near-term fixes. Marcus Curatin, identified in the meeting as the county’s new GIS point of contact from the city IT group, was named as the staff contact to restore GIS layers and hydrant data that were corrupted during a merge by the former GIS manager, Jim Kylie. Commission members said FirstView had imported some historical calls but that fire-zone and district layers have not been imported because the GIS layers remain unresolved. The commission also reported intermittent failures in the CAD connection with the vendor named in the meeting as “Tower New World,” saying alerts sometimes arrive to FirstView either before or after Active 9-1-1 and that staff and the vendor are continuing to…